Почти 10 000 женщин были изнасилованы досмерти. Девушка подняла юбку, сказав: неменее 20 мужчин тыкали меня сюда |
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ChineseHistory — April 10, 2017
On May 2, 1945, the Nazi troops defending Berlin surrendered and the Red Army occupied the city. Although the war was over, for Berlin’s civilian population—especially its women—the nightmare was only beginning. A historical research association at the University of Göttingen wrote that as many as one third of Berlin’s women were raped. German historians Sanders and Johr arrived at a more cautious estimate: around 100,000 women in Berlin were raped by Soviet soldiers, and 40 percent of them were raped repeatedly. In Russia, however, merely mentioning the rapes of the Second World War is often treated as an insult and an affront.
During the Soviet occupation of Berlin, one third of the city’s women were raped. According to the American historian William Hitchcock, some women were raped as many as sixty or seventy times. The sharp rise in the abortion rate in the months that followed, together with contemporary hospital reports, has been cited as evidence that nearly 10,000 women died as a result of rape.
Although documentary evidence about rapes committed by Soviet troops is scarce, some private writings have survived and preserve fragments of what happened. Two diaries written in and after the spring of 1945 may help us understand the events. The first was written by Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish lieutenant from Ukraine. After Gelfand’s death, his son Vitaly discovered the diary while sorting through his father’s papers.
As the Red Army entered what Soviet propaganda called “the lair of the fascist beast,” a propaganda officer put up a banner intended to raise the soldiers’ morale: “Soldiers! You are now on German soil—the hour of revenge has come!”
Lieutenant Gelfand’s diary contains a harrowing description of a group of German women fleeing the outskirts of Berlin.
“Their faces were full of fear,” he wrote. “They told me what had happened on the first night after the Red Army arrived.” One German girl lifted her skirt and said, “They did it to me here—no fewer than twenty men.” She burst into tears. “Stay here,” she suddenly pleaded with him. “Sleep with me. You can do anything you want to me, but only you!”
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